


Walking It Off (Or, Morbid Stuff)

by milesawayfromthevoid



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Ben Hanscom is a Good Friend, Beverly Marsh is a Good Friend, Canon Rewrite, Canon-Typical Violence, Eddie Is Braver Than He Thinks, Eddie Kaspbrak Has OCD, Gen, Intrusive Thoughts, It's quick and by an evil clown posing as his shit mom but. you know, Minor Ben Hanscom/Beverly Marsh, Misgendering, Missing Scene, The Pharmacy Scene, Trans Eddie Kaspbrak, beware anyway
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-03
Updated: 2019-11-03
Packaged: 2021-01-21 12:21:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21299372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/milesawayfromthevoid/pseuds/milesawayfromthevoid
Summary: He's forty and he's standing in front of the pharmacy basement door. He needs to do this.AKA: Whoever Chose Angel Of The Morning Can Meet Me In The Pit
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak & The Losers Club, Eddie Kaspbrak & moving past his trauma (pre-relationship)
Comments: 5
Kudos: 26





	Walking It Off (Or, Morbid Stuff)

**Author's Note:**

> First of all, PUP's "Morbid Stuff" is a banger, go listen to it.  
Second! This is gonna deal w intrusive thoughts, OCD, the feeling of being trapped in your head and your body that I go through a lot as a mentally ill trans guy and that I'm copy-pasting onto Eddie. This is also gonna have my fears about discussing OCD. If you're going through it right now, this might not be the best time to read it.  
Third: the Pharmacy scene hit me like a truck so I'm kinda pissed that the crew decided to turn the tone at the last second so it's a joke. Same w Bowers: dude was super scary in the first movie w/out being a stereotype of mental illness.

His heart is pounding out of his chest and his stomach is churning when he enters the basement. The calls for help only get louder, more clearly his mother’s. 

His shoes crunch over the glass and needles on the floor. He takes a sharp inhale from the panic, feeling extremely self-conscious about where his body is and whether it’s touching anything. This is so, so wrong, like a collage made from his nightmares that got pasted onto reality.  _ This can’t be real _ , he thinks, but the sound of a squeaking rat ( _ rabies tularemia the goddamn bubonic plague _ ) slowly draws him away from rational thought.

His mother’s voice only adds to the panic. She says a name that Eddie had long since learned to tune out, for the sake of his own sanity, then, "Get over here and  _ help me _ !"

"Mommy? Why are you down here?" He asks, voice trembling. 

None of this makes sense, it can't be real. 

He tries to think that to himself, anyway, but suddenly a blood bag swings loose, hitting him in the head. He shrieks as more seem to approach him, taunting him with thoughts of blood-born illnesses and used, dirty needles. He ends up falling, his bare knees and palms getting stuck with glass and needles, some sliding in under his cast, digging into his healing arm. He can feel his breaths start to shorten. It's so much worse than the alley: at least bottle glass wasn't considered medical waste. 

He's in pain and he's terrified, but his mother's pleas for help are enough to fortify his resolve and continue his trek to the end of the room. 

He pulls back the curtain, sees her strapped down. His confusion only grows, how the Hell she got there is beyond him, but he puts it aside as he sees just how afraid she is. Then he really puts it aside when he hears a groan and turns to see the leper in the corner. 

His hands fumble with the straps, yanking on the buckles, trying to get his mother free. 

_ It's not real _ , the rational part of his brain is saying.

The leper comes a little closer.

_ You're gonna die if you stay _ , it insists.  _ The clown is real, but your mom isn’t here. Run, Eddie. _

His hands are still moving. He can do this, he just needs to get her free, because it's likely an illusion but _ what if _ it isn't.

The bracket or whatever it's called that's holding the pipe up breaks and the leper advances another couple of feet.

_ That's not how leprosy works, dumbass!  _

The last piece of metal breaks and for once in his life, common sense takes the reigns over the voice in his head. 

“I’m sorry, mommy,” he cries, because he still needs to say it, even if it’s just an illusion. 

He turns and runs out of the basement, slamming the door shut and holding himself against it. 

“It’s not real, it’s not real, this is just what It does,” he whispers to himself. With a shuddering breath, he raises a shaking hand up to his face, trying to see the extent of the damage from the glass and needles. 

Nothing. Eddie practically sobs with relief. Just a fucking hallucination. 

Part of him itches to take another look downstairs, and he knows it will keep him anxious until he sees his mom, alive and well, again. But fear and his common sense back him out of the pharmacy. 

It’s only when he’s out again that he realizes he forgot his inhaler down there. He groans at the thought of explaining how it got there.

_ Shit _ . 

* * *

He's forty and he's standing in front of the pharmacy basement door. He needs to do this.

He needs to know. Derry's collective bullshit drew back that one particular obsession, and now he needs to put it to rest. He opens the door and sneaks down. Every creak in the steps feels like a neon sign, blinking out "Oh Shit, Eddie's Back! Time For Him To Float!" But the basement is quiet, only the white noise of the buzz of fluorescent lights and the hum of machinery breaking the quiet. It’s clean. Dusty, dim, but clean. 

"It's fine, just a basement," he repeats like a hymn, trying to make it real. "Just an old basement. Nothing's here."

No needles, no blood bags, no medical waste. Just dusty shelves, jars of pills and fluids, and some cardboard boxes filled with overstock. Eddie's probably breathing in mold with how unclean this place looks, and he holds the corner of his hoodie against his lips and nose; but otherwise he's gonna be okay. He has to be. 

He stops in front of the curtain. He wonders briefly what reasonable explanation there is for a curtain in a pharmacy basement, but decides to put it to rest. Begs himself to put it to rest. 

He reaches out, gripping the faded, grimy plastic curtain tightly in a slightly trembling fist. 

“Showtime. Here we go, Eds,” he says to himself, thinking of Richie for a brief moment, then draws the curtain back quickly. 

Nothing. A few more shelves, a boiler, but otherwise nothing. No torture chair, no swinging chain and collar. No leper. It’s so nondescript and mundane that Eddie could jump for joy.

He settles on breathing out a sigh of relief instead. “Well, Kaspbrak, that solves --”

That sentence is interrupted by a low, pained groaning noise. Something grabs him and starts pushing him towards the wall. When his eyes catch up to the panic in his brain, he sees It. It’s the leper, and it’s so, so much worse when it’s actually able to touch and hurt him. He can feel it’s breath on his face, the places where it’s nails dig into his skin. A tongue lolls out, threatening to shove itself into his mouth like it did with his mother, infect him, rot his body from the inside out. Without thinking, he wraps his own hands around it’s throat and squeezes. 

It shrinks underneath his grasp, but not like a shapeshifter. More like someone actually getting strangled. All he can think about is how it's a diseased, shambling corpse, and he needs to keep it off of him or he'll die too, so he gets the strength from adrenaline to push it away.

The room is full of gasps that aren't his own, and Eddie feels a rush of victory. He's beating it! It's actually choking under his grasp!

"Fuck you!" He screams, giddy and hysterical. "Fuck you! Fuck you!" Here, in this stinking basement, he might actually kill that fucking clown --

And in a snap, everything turns.

It vomited on him. 

Putrid, stinking, diseased vomit.

It didn't go away.

Oh dear fucking shit in heaven, the vomit wasn't leaving and Pennywise the goddamn clown probably wasn't gone, either.

He bolts out of there like a bat out of Hell, the sound of high and wheezing laughter following him all the way out of the pharmacy. The embarrassment he would normally feel trying to open a pair of push doors by pulling them is completely outweighed by the phantom feeling of decaying fingers grasping at his jacket, his shoulders, his neck.

* * *

He’s shaking. He’s moving on autopilot, but all he can think of is all the goddamn pathogens making their way through his mucus membranes and down his throat and in his eyes. It got into his throat, when he screamed, and his mouth is welling up with all his efforts not to swallow it down and make it worse.

He's terrified. He thought he could beat the leper-alike, he thought he could finally make it  _ unreal _ , but the... unnamed filth on his face (because if he names it it’s so much fucking  _ worse _ ) is stinging with how much he can’t stop focusing on it. It’s still there, drying against his skin, burning with -- was that stomach acid? Oh, god, maybe. Point being, it was  _ still fucking there _ . He knew, logically, that it was just Pennywise fucking with him, but that didn't stop the alarm of sheer fucking terror from blaring out in his brain. Every second is another second exposed to germs of a leper. Where was he even going to go? 

The hospital is his first idea, and his legs almost pulled him there automatically, but he realizes how crazy he’d sound if he told them that there was either a late-stage victim or a shambling corpse with Hansen’s disease in the pharmacy basement. OH,  _ and _ it threw up all over him. Except, it might be just pretend, so all he needs is just a quick sample and lab to soothe his anxiety.

Yeah, good luck with that sell, Kaspbrak. 

He’d be institutionalized, he realizes, as he sharply turns his body in the direction of the hotel. He’d be thrown in a rubber room with a straightjacket and be forced to consume pills he couldn’t even name (and that's saying a lot considering its _ him _ ), and he  _ needs _ to know what he’s taking, and he wouldn’t be able to wash his hands or clean himself of his own accord. No one would believe him, and he’ll be forced to scream for help while the leprosy slowly eats away at him, and his mother warned him about this and that’s why he can’t trust any doctor without her there to protect him, he can’t protect himself, not then and not now, and --

He’s spiraling. He’s visualising it, he’s feeding his obsessions, and he’s spiraling.

Distantly, he remembers the advice he got off the internet. Step out of the situation. There's a bench on the side of the road that he forces himself to sit on. He’s itching for his inhaler, but he resists so that he doesn't dirty  _ that _ , too.

He runs a hand along his collarbone and breathes in tandem with the motion. He focuses his thoughts on the sink in his room, the complementary bars of soap and the ones he brought from home. The promise of being clean almost satiates an image of his skin sloughing off. Shower? No, not enough time, he needs to leave Derry  _ pronto _ and he can’t afford to be caught unawares. If he starts a shower, he won’t be able to leave it. 

Whatever is on him stings even more, and he can’t sit still. With one last steadying breath, he forces his thoughts onto the hotel room.

The walk to the hotel is done mostly on autopilot and Eddie thanks his lucky stars that he always had a good head for direction. He doesn’t remember what he says to Bev and Ben, just hopes that he hasn’t touched them and infected them because they’d die slowly and it’d be his -- no. No, nope, not going there. His limbs are shaking almost violently as he takes the steps two at a time. Once he’s in the room, he’s washing up as much as he can. His hands will be dry and chapped, most likely bleeding, by the time he’s done but he doesn’t find a single shit to give. Just scrubs and scratches and lathers and rinses and repeats until his arms feel clean. Then he moves the bar up to his head and soaps up his face, his hair. 

"And then the leper? He threw up all over me," he says, between splashing his face. Talking through this helps. Makes it less serious, or some bullshit. “‘Hey, it’s Mike Hanlon! Why don’t you come back to Maine?’"

With a shaky sigh, he straightens up, reaching for a towel. He only catches a flash of the sight of someone behind him in the mirror before there a fucking knife in his cheek. 

Pain blossoms there like he’s been decked in the face, but it’s overwhelmed by the pants-shitting realization of the fact that there’s a man in his room with a knife and intent to murder Eddie. No, not just any man -- Henry Bowers. 

Eddie screams and the blade morbidly flaps a little with the movement. His hands reach up and touch the handle (and  _ Jesus fucking wept _ , he just drove it straight to the hilt there) and prevent it from moving any more.

“Why the fuck would you do that?” he whimpers around the  _ fucking knife in his cheek _ , backing away as he does so.

“He says it’s your time, Eddie.” 

Bowers stares at him with all the intensity one would expect from a bully turned puppet of an evil clown. Every step towards Eddie is a promise that his life is about to get so much fucking worse before it ends abruptly. Which sucks, because if there was one place Eddie would absolutely hate to die -- barring the sewers, his old house, his  _ new  _ house, Derry in totality -- it’s a hotel bathroom. Especially a hotel bathroom that has some suspicious spots in the corner by the shower. 

"Time to float," Bowers says, in a sing-song voice. He keeps talking, but there's a roar in Eddie's ears that's kinda drowning him out, and all he can do is stare and nod.

_ Time to float _ , says the clown, and Eddie is thirteen years old again, cradling a broken arm to his chest and feeling his lungs lock up with panic. 

Hysteria finally takes hold. He chuckles along with Henry, moving back in slow and steady steps to avoid losing this moment of peace. He steps into the tub, one more barrier against the danger in the room. He pulls the curtain back, choking down a sob as he does. 

_ Gonna die gonna die gonna die in this piece of shit body in a piece of shit hotel in a piece of shit town and I won’t even be fucking buried with my real name this is  _ bullshit _ why the  _ fuck _ did I come back _ , he thinks. He swallows, careful not to cut his tongue against the steel (which, thank fuck, was still whole). 

The knife. Shit, he still has the knife. Carefully, he bites down on his fingers to stifle any noise as he pulls out the knife.

Huh. He actually doesn’t feel anything. Or, okay, he feels the slide of steel against the flesh of his mouth, but he other than that he's oddly numb. Also a little out of his body.

_ It's the shock, idiot _ , his brain supplies.

That's not good, but it's a problem that future-Eddie, who's also hopefully-not-dead-Eddie, has to deal with. Present-Eddie is a little preoccupied.

He sees the shadow of Bowers, illuminated by the setting sun, through the curtain. He’s reaching for the curtain. He’s going to expose Eddie, and he has about a snowball’s chance in hell if it comes down to a fight. 

Fight or flight or freeze. His body picks option one, with barely a say from his mind. 

"Now," Bowers growls. "Give me back my  _ fucking knife _ ."

Eddie stabs blindly at the center of the silhouette, pushing the knife in to the hilt. 

The curtain pulls away, ring by ring, as Bowers backs away and then just stands there, wheezing. His eyes are on the knife. Eddie climbs out of the tub. His arm is frozen in it's stabbing position. His legs aren’t working right. They’re more sliding and trembling than actually stepping. His vision is spinning and narrowing into a blurry tunnel and the world tilting on its axis, but he doesn’t trip, so it’s a win. He scoots around Bowers, hugging the wall, watching him like he's expecting Bowers to spring up and stab him again.

Because he  _ was _ fully expecting him to do just that.

"You should cut that fucking mullet, it's been thirty years, man,” he spits out dazedly as he’s shuffling out. Apparently he lost his sense of self-preservation, but he supposes he already  _ did  _ when he agreed to come back here.

Also, the feeling of air hissing through his cheek is, distantly, very disturbing, and talking only seems to make it worse.

The doorway is open, and the realization that Ben and Bev were downstairs when Bowers was in the hotel hits him like a bucket of cold water. Was the knife clean? He didn’t get a good look. What if Bowers brought multiple? What if  _ he _ got off easy in this situation? Fuck fuck  _ fuck -- _

“Guys?” He screams through the open doorway.

In response are the sound of pounding footsteps and Bev’s concerned, “Eds?!” His knees find some strength for the next few steps. Good. They’re safe, that’s good. Shaking with adrenaline, he shuffles his way out of his room, and into the hall. Ben and Bev turn the corner, and he must look like shit, because Bev screams. 

He jerkily nods to his room. 

“Bowers is in my room,” he explains. His voice is slurring and he isn't sure if it's from the pooling blood or the wound or just the physical presence of the knife. Or just fear. “I got stabbed. Stabbed him. Dead? I think he's dead?” 

Bev steadies him as Ben rushes into Eddie’s room, looking for all the world like he’s about to kick ass. 

Meanwhile, Eddie feels his legs turn to jelly and he's saying, "Is it bad? Do you think it's bad?" Because he still can't fucking feel his cheek and the hallway doesn’t have any mirrors. Actually, no, that’s a good thing that he can’t see himself, because he’s gonna have nightmares about this for weeks already. The panic that ought to be here, in this moment, feels like the sight of shore: eventually, he’ll hit it, but there’s plenty of wading to do beforehand.

"Honey," she says. She's shaken, too. "It's better than I thought. You'll be right as rain soon enough."

She's lying, the little voice says, because she knows you'll flip shit and leave town.

He couldn't stop the intrusive thought if he tried, but for once, he can't really find himself caring. 

"I got stabbed," he repeats instead, dazed. "Do you think it'll get infected?"

"Not on our watch," she responds fiercely.

Bev gently touches around it, squeezing it together, and  _ fuck _ , now that he's being comforted by a friend is  _ of course _ when the wound decides to burn like a motherfucker. He sincerely hopes that whatever disgusting juice was on him before was properly cleaned away, because he can't cope if he lives through this whole experience but gets gangrene or leprosy or, fuck, with his luck, leptospirosis or something.

Bev is helping him stand when Ben bursts back into the hallway. 

"He's gone," he says. It's not a comforting "gone", not "he won't be bothering you Eddie, you're safe, also let's leave Derry in our dust now and be done with it." No, it's a "just our luck, he's gone out the window and lives to wreck our lives for another day."

"Of course," he breathes a laugh, wincing as his lips pull the wound. "Anything else?"

**Author's Note:**

> he'll be fine lmao


End file.
